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Pick the Next Extra History Series! "Magic, Occult & Spooky Vibes"
🕑 Added 2024-05-22 18:48:37 +0000 UTC
It's time for our Extra History poll! Where you get to vote on what our next Extra History Series is about!
These four topics were selected from our "Magic, Occult & Spooky Vibes" Patreon Suggestions and are listed in no particular order below.
London Horror: From Ghosts to Spring-Heeled Jack
Doctor Johnson famously said that when one tires of London, one tires of life—and that's apparently true for spooks too. Not only does London have a history of hauntings, there are times when it transcended mere myth or rumor to become a major part of the city's life. Take the sightings of Spring-Heeled Jack, an iron-clawed, fire-breathing figure said to be able to leap walls and carriages to make his escape. He began a citywide panic so profound, the Duke of Wellington himself started nightly patrols. Or the London Monster, an assailant who between 1788 and 1790 attacked random women in the street, pricking or stabbing them with needles. The resulting press firestorm eerily presaged the later Jack the Ripper killings, and the resulting arrest, trial, and possibly false conviction of a florist remains controversial to this day. And of course, no account would be complete without the Cock Lane Ghost, a hoax poltergeist that accused a recently-widowed man of having poisoned his wife, leading to a media circus, a sex scandal, an investigation by the city's leading minds (including Samuel Johnson, Sir John Fielding of Bow Street, and Horace Walpole) before a trial landed several participants in prison. What else? Well, we'll keep our options open.
History of the Yeti: Out of the Snows
What does a Yeti look like? Big, white and apelike? Not in the Nepali folktales. There the Yachê (yeti) or the related nyalmu (wild man) are intelligent creatures who sometimes become devotees of Buddhist monks or even kidnap and have children with wandering mountain travellers. They are a spiritual figure, possibly pre-Buddhist, and seen as a religious omen or cosmic enforcer. Or at least, they were until western mountaineers got their hands on them. As western climbers entered the Himalayas and especially competed to summit Everest, sightings of unidentified animals combined with folktales from Nepali guides to create a full-on sensation, as a largely spiritual Himalayan symbol became zoologized into an unidentified missing link. Climbers, too, got in on the action—realizing newspapers would sponsor their adventure or scientific expeditions if they also involved yeti-hunting. The result was not only a fever of media but also real international crimes, as unscrupulous investigators stole hair or bones from Buddhist monastery relics and no less than actor Jimmy Stewart smuggled a "yeti finger" past customs. Perhaps inevitably, this interest created a tourism market in the region, where yetis now serve as mascots of airlines, climbing tours, and the government of Bhutan has designated an official wildlife sanctuary for the creature.
Nazi Occultism: Oh, It Gets Weirder!
IIndiana Jones and Hellboy aren't great history, but they get one thing right—Nazis were into some weird crap. However, it's probably not exactly what you imagine. From the earliest days of the party, before Hitler encountered them, what would become the Nazi movement was obsessed with such pseudosciences as World Ice Theory (the idea that ice moons had smashed into the Earth, destroying ancient advanced civilizations), and the kind of mystical and spiritualist beliefs you'd more associate with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. What's shocking, however, is how this blending of myth, occultism, and bizarre beliefs about the ancient past not only drove archaeological study in Nazi Germany (in an attempt to prove that ancient Germans settlers had started Rome, ancient Egypt, and Greece) but also helped underpin the expansionist political claims on those territories. Throughout the war, many top-level figures in Germany consulted followers of pseudoscience on things as important as Russian weather patterns, and as bizarre as whether dowsing could help discover Allied shipping convoys. Though perhaps the most interesting aspect came at the end of the war, as Germany stared down defeat—when the Nazis turned against public displays of the supernatural, banning psychics, Tarot card readings, magic performances and even executing fortune tellers for predicting an Axis defeat.
Jack the Ripper: Beyond the Killings
For over 135 years, we've wondered—who carried out the horrible slayings in Whitechapel? Well, we're not going to answer that. In fact, this series isn't so much about the killings themselves, and instead focuses on what they show us about London at the close of the Victorian Age. We'll look at the Ripper's victims—low-wage workers, frequently homeless, and occasionally (but not always or permanently) engaging in the sex trade. We'll look at the development of London's police force and newspaper culture, which played into the furore surrounding the killings, as well as the place of London within the wider British Empire and Atlantic World, where news (and people) could disseminate across vast distances. The London we see is not the lurid alleyways we've been trained to see when looking at the Ripper killings. It involves active women-led labor movements, a police force in the midst of modernizing reforms, and a city with a large immigrant population where the description of a killer in a "leather apron" could actually be a dog whistle attempting to pin the crime on minority groups. However, we also see a city in the grips of major poverty and an employment crisis, with cheap, government-subsidized alcohol wreaking havoc on those who'd fallen through the cracks. Finally, we see a social movement arising from the killings that would reinvent the slum area of Whitechapel.
Our Current Schedule is:
Hypatia of Alexandria - Starting 5/25 -> Invasion of Canada: The Battle of Quebec -> Giuseppe Garibaldi: Unifying Italy -> Your Vote!
***Friendly reminder: The poll will end at 11:59 PM PT on Wednesday the 29th. You can vote for as many choices as you want! This style of voting helps us see what people are most interested in without having to make tough decisions between a couple of close favorites. ***
Comments
Extra History
Thanks so much to everyone who voted!
Jacob White
Sparking debate like this is exactly what videos like these are supposed to do.
Harp Man
Unfortunately, many other history tubers are not so lucky. But I think with it being drawn, it might denture the YouTube gods somwhat.
fictionfan0
I'm sure that, it being a series of historical education, it'll get a pass.
Harp Man
I recommend you be careful with the Nazi series because YouTube probably won’t appreciate it. Just make sure the censorship isn’t too annoying or obvious. That way we can focus on the fascinating story.
Martin Verran
You've forgotten to include the cult of the Supreme Chicken again!
Jacob White
The Nazi party is a constant warning from history. You are right to be concerned how Fascism appears time and again.
Benjamin Fouty
With respect to your sincere and honest point, I couldnt disagree more. People have a bandwidth and learning everything drowns out what is important. It isn’t that i dont want to look at Nazis, it’s that i am tired of focusing on stupid stuff about Nazis. I am very concerned about about how fascism happens again and again. Nazism is bad because it was a lawless authoritarian regime that murdered millions. Nazism is not bad because believed quirky, silly, things. It is important to understand the signs and symptoms of developing fascism. Another series on their search for the Ark is not. If you want to talk about “never again” then let’s talk about how fascism takes root in frustration with multi-party democracy becoming ineffective at governing. Let’s talk about language identifying minorities as the cause of “the problem” leads to mass murder. Let’s talk about how normal people sleepwalk into complicity because they “just don’t want to get involved.” Clickbait series on making fun of Nazi’s crazy beliefs about things most people already agree is silly does more to trivialize and isolate them as angry dudes in funny pants. What we need to remember and take warning from is an insidious mindset that is disturbingly easy for many to fall into and all of a sudden whole towns are being purged of Kosovars or Tutsis or Rohingya. Another series about Nazi occult or jet weapons or mistakes at Leningrad trivializes relevant analogies by making them something that just can’t happen here. “We cant become like the Nazis because they were looking for the Ark and we would never do that.” It makes them more of the villains in Indiana Jones and less of an organized set of behaviors and attitudes that people easily fall into or learn to get along with.
Jacob White
I am not at all surprised by this development. No one is supposed to like the Nazi party, with that war claiming 60,000,000+ lives, everyone knows someone who died, or survived. I'm using myself as example for this one. My grandfather served in North Africa and in Sicily where he served his country as a translator German POW's being fluent in the language himself. Did he face stigma for it? most likely, but he overcame that and would retire at the rank of Captain. He's buried in Sisseton South Dakota.
Jacob White
As much as it's painful to see Benjamin, the only way we can prevent it from ever happening again, is to learn about it. Their history is painful in the extreme, it's uglier then any monster, and more horrifying then any nightmare. But for the saying "Never Again" to be true, we must learn all the parts of what history has to teach us. For example, the racism that the USA still struggles with, but in this case, the example is the Occult of the National Socialist German Worker's Party, or in German, NSDP. It was a party born from the Treaty Of Versaille, when the German military didn't feel defeated. But many of them felt like they had been betrayed by those in the fatherland, namely the politicians and their favorite scapegoats, the Jews. History tells the story that I am unable to find the courage to tell.
Benjamin Fouty
Please no nazis. The history channel is already quite complete.
Michael Truscott
I am horrified by the Na…( I’m not even going to say it) and I am eager to see them be made fun of, because I strongly absolutely detest the Naz.. Also a new Na.. lair has been found, I think it is on the news app.
Jacob White
Himmler built the SS to mimic king arthur's court, the nazis even funded an expedition to locate the Holy Grail. There was also the officer stationed at the Austrian museum where so called "Spear Of Destiny" was housed. Their occult practices and beliefs makes my stomach turn, another example is the runes used in the infamous SS patch.
